In 1980, Kevin Parker was a precocious teenager with a bright idea for a new way to glue loose printed pages into booklet form.

Today, the 42-year-old inventor employs about 100 people at Powis Parker Inc., a West Berkeley firm that makes a line of automated binding systems that it sells to print shops around the world.

During the past two decades, the privately owned firm has built a roughly $20 million-a-year business selling document binding technology to law firms, government agencies and corporate and commercial print shops.

But William Sullivan, a binding industry consultant in Rochester, N.Y, says Parker's newest device -- an easy-to-use bookbinder -- could be the biggest thing to hit the consumer market since desktop publishing.

"Kevin's technology is going to play a major role in bringing the capability to produce a high-quality book down to a quantity of one," said Sullivan.

But Sullivan wasn't always a fan of the Berkeley inventor. He worked for Xerox Corp. during the 1980s, when the copier giant filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Parker that nearly killed his fledgling business.

"Xerox flew teams of lawyers out here to sue him," said Jim Kelley, Parker's former high school teacher and mentor. "It was the most wonderful David & Goliath story."

Parker, an unassuming man, still lives in the North Berkeley home where his parents, both artists, created a basement workshop. It was in this environment, surrounded by glue pots and other tools of the trade, that Parker developed an interest in binding.

"Some of the artists would want their artwork bound into small books, and I would do it," he said.

Through contacts in the art world -- his mother, Kathan Brown, runs Crown Point Press, a fine art print firm in San Francisco -- Parker became apprenticed to Hans Shuberth, a now-deceased Bay Area bookbinder.

But Parker's high school experiences would turn his hobby into a livelihood.

Parker attended Maybeck High School, an exclusive private institution in Berkeley. Former teacher Jim Kelly remembers that, as a boy, Parker combined a passion for photography and astronomy.

"During the pre-admission interview, he told me he had a cover photo on the magazine Astronomy, and I thought, 'Yeah right,' " said Kelly, who was impressed to see the young man's name was indeed on the photo credit.

At Maybeck, Parker gravitated to the school's yearbook staff, where he took charge of making the 100 books that were handed out to honor his graduating class of '79. In that small a quantity, the big yearbook companies wouldn't touch the project. Local printers could have fastened the pages with a plastic spiral binding, but that prospect offended Parker's aesthetic sensibilities.

"So I stayed up all night before the graduation and sewed all 100 copies of the 50-page yearbook," Parker said, thinking there had to be a better way.

After Maybeck, Parker entered UC Berkeley, intending to major in astronomy. He was in his freshman year when his mentor, Jim Kelly, made the suggestion that was to prove a lifelong detour.

Back then, Kelly ran an office supply business in addition to teaching. Among the products he sold were adhesive strips produced by a Xerox-owned company called Cheshire. The adhesive strips went into the Cheshire machine, which fused the strip to a sheaf of pages, binding them into a booklet.

Kelly said he sold a lot of these strips to corporate print shops, which complained that they let the pages slip. He mentioned this to Parker, and suggested the young man try to invent a better adhesive.

"I thought it would be an interesting project," said Parker, who figured he could take a semester off and be done with it.

For Parker, who never returned to UC Berkeley, the challenge proved more formidable than he had thought.

In order to produce adhesive strips, Parker first had to build a machine resembling an old-style movie projector to deposit glue onto a backing similar to that found in adhesive labels. The machine also had to cut the binding strips into uniform lengths.

Parker, then 19, sought help from his friends at the Maybeck astronomy club, who had worked with him on a project -- overseen by Kelly -- to rehabilitate a radio telescope.

Maybeck alumna Sharon Jelinsky, who now builds satellites for UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, worked for Parker in the days when he was starting his business in the basement of his Berkeley home.

"He had this quiet power about him, this sense of what was possible," she said.

By 1982, Parker had created an adhesive strip that worked in the Cheshire machine, and it was arguably better than the Xerox product. Kelly was ready to sell the strips. All Parker needed was a name for his new company.

"My full name is Kevin Powis Parker, and I thought Powis Parker sounded something like Hewlett-Packard," he said.

In the spring of 1985, however, Parker got a letter from Xerox which said that, as far as it was concerned, selling his strips for use in its machine constituted patent infringement.

"We spent every penny we had to fight the lawsuit," said Parker, who settled the suit a few months later by agreeing to stop selling his strips for use in the Cheshire machine.

By then, however, Parker was already at work designing his own machine to replace the Cheshire device -- doing an end run around Xerox's complaint.

Two decades later, in Parker's Berkeley factory, his second-generation glue machine turns out adhesive strips 24 hours a day. Elsewhere, small teams of workers build three binding machines that heat the strips and fuse the glue to the page.

Parker said the firm makes a small profit on the machines, which range in price from $1,395 to $4,295. But the real money is in the adhesive strips, which cost roughly 25 cents to 38 cents each, depending on the thickness of the document.

Kimo Rodrigues, who runs the corporate print shop at Men's Warehouse in Fremont and is a longtime user of Powis Parker document binders, said he gets nothing but compliments on the sales and training manuals his staff turns out.

Document printers like Rodrigues have long been the company's core market.

But last January, Powis Parker entered a new realm when it began shipping its first machine-and-strip combination to bind softcover and hardcover books.

Sullivan, the former Xerox employee, said before the Powis Parker system, prospective book publishers had to order hundreds or thousands of books to make economical use of current automated binding equipment.

Sullivan said if quick-print shops adopt the technology and offer it to consumers, people could come in and print their own books.

He envisions people bringing family histories and digital photo albums into print shops, which would then use Parker's binder to produce what he called "personalized coffee table books."

San Francisco Internet guru Brewster Kahle has already demonstrated the device's potential. Under a grant from the World Bank, Kahle has equipped a van with a desktop publishing system and Parker's new binder, and sent it into remote African villages to give away books.

"Right now we're using his (Parker's) binder to make books for kids in Uganda," Kahle said. "It's wild."

As for Parker, the artist-turned-entrepreneur professes only one interest:

developing the company he built.

"The main thing I've learned is that the way I made any of the big steps was out of ignorance," he said.

"If I had known what the trials and tribulations would be, I would probably have been too dismayed to do it."